Jonas Mekas: The Camera was Always Running
2022
The Jewish Museum, New York City
Cultural (Completed)
6,000 SF
Curator: Kelly Taxter
Photography: Dario Lasagni and Michael Vahrenwald/Esto
The exhibition is organized in three parts, with a more traditional ‘white box’ introduction and conclusion showing physical artifacts and material by the artist bookending a large-scale screening room. Therein, films are shown over a field of twelve screens that visitors can move freely through as a peripatetic experience, and by doing so, re-editing the films into infinite new sequences.
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The films themselves, eleven in total, are screened in chronological order, divided into chapters and projected onto the large-scale, free-floating projection walls. Subdivided chapters play at the same time with sound controlled by directional speakers that produce moments of clarity in the larger field of overlapping soundtracks. Visitors are encouraged to enter the ‘orbit’ of each screen, moving between collective and intimate viewing. The screens themselves all face the center of the screening room, where visitors can watch all twelve projections at once—creating a dense field of visual information. The layout corresponds to Mekas’s observational approach to filmmaking, in which the world around was allowed to simply happen, or unfold, with the filmmaker as a peripheral observer.
2022
The Jewish Museum, New York City
Cultural (Completed)
6,000 SF
Curator: Kelly Taxter
Photography: Dario Lasagni and Michael Vahrenwald/Esto
The exhibition is organized in three parts, with a more traditional ‘white box’ introduction and conclusion showing physical artifacts and material by the artist bookending a large-scale screening room. Therein, films are shown over a field of twelve screens that visitors can move freely through as a peripatetic experience, and by doing so, re-editing the films into infinite new sequences.
The films themselves, eleven in total, are screened in chronological order, divided into chapters and projected onto the large-scale, free-floating projection walls. Subdivided chapters play at the same time with sound controlled by directional speakers that produce moments of clarity in the larger field of overlapping soundtracks. Visitors are encouraged to enter the ‘orbit’ of each screen, moving between collective and intimate viewing. The screens themselves all face the center of the screening room, where visitors can watch all twelve projections at once—creating a dense field of visual information. The layout corresponds to Mekas’s observational approach to filmmaking, in which the world around was allowed to simply happen, or unfold, with the filmmaker as a peripheral observer.